Preventive resource allocation of complex systems and apical dominance

For complex engineering systems, their components or subsystem are likely vulnerable due to the mis-operations or intentional attacks. Preventive investment in the components is necessary to guarantee the safety critical systems to work properly and in high performance. The purpose of this paper is to propose an efficient and effective resource allocation strategy to distribute the limited preventive investment to the systems, which is learned from the botanic phenomenon: apical dominance. A resource allocation model is presented with this strategy, in which important factors in calculating 'auxin', the terminology used in botany, are discussed. We illustrate the strategy of allocating the resource with a numerical example.